Jamie A. Thomas
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#languagestory blog

Video & perspectives on communication, intercultural learning & the impact of anthropological research.

Media Stereotypes: The Power of Speaking Your Mind

9/24/2018

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A student describes how media stereotypes impact his study abroad experience.Amman, JORDAN: I talked with a U.S.-based student who described how media stereotypes have impacted his study abroad experience.
By age 6, young girls are already impacted by gendered stereotypes of intellectual ability (and media representations of scientists and engineers, for example). This is according to a 2017 study published in Science.  

In fact, there is no doubt that media stereotypes and representations have wide-ranging influence, but how should we respond to these when they impact our everyday interactions as adults? 

Media Smarts, Canada's Centre for Digital and Media Literacy, reports that stereotypes in video games, films, and other avenues of popular culture influence the real-life treatment of protected groups across North America, including:
  • First Nations, Aboriginal, and Indigenous people,
  • persons with disabilities, and
  • people of varying sexual orientation and gender identification.

Moreover, in her oft-cited book English With an Accent, sociolinguist Rosina Lippi-Green, among others, has shown how media stereotypes--even those in Disney films--reflective of ideologies of language contribute to depictions of racial, ethnic, and gender groups in particular ways. These are depictions that have long been a tool of language discrimination in the U.S., as linguists John McWhorter, John Rickford, and others have explained, in separate analyses of courtroom proceedings in the wake of the 2012 Trayvon Martin shooting.

So, if media stereotypes and language ideologies impact young children, popular culture, and the everyday conduct of courtrooms, how do they impact contexts of education abroad? How might it be empowering to speak truth to disarm stereotypes?


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The Often Forgotten Intersectionality of Race, Gender, and Language

2/7/2018

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by Jamie A. Thomas

Why is Language Missing From the Conversation?

I'm picking up the blog this month with a post that highlights how the way our bodies are read--in coordination with the languages we speak--can make for very different intersections with race and gender. How many of us think about language learning when we consider the combined impacts of racialization and gendering? How many study abroad coordinators are aware of intersectional challenges for their students of color?

Why do we forget to consider language as another dimension of our social experience? Because we take it for granted. Language is such a regularly embedded and embodied aspect of our everyday experience, we sometimes are unaware of how it can contextually shift in its use to construct ideals of woman, nation, or Arabic-speaker, for example.

The video posted below on "Study Abroad in Jordan" is my latest installment of the #LanguageStory video series, and follows two college students, Laye and Erica, in their sojourn to Amman, Jordan. I met each of them during my time as an ethnographer embedded in Jordan, and their friendship is all the more powerful considering their many differences: Laye is a first-generation Muslim immigrant to the U.S., and Erica is a White American woman with aspirations for a career in Dubai. 

Watch the Video.

It's Real: Race and Gender Have Impacts on Second Language Learning.

It's a bit paradoxical, but the notion of language is quite often missing from discussion of how socially (and culturally) constructed categories of identity can impact our experiences. In many ways, words said and unsaid can contribute to discrimination, exclusion, and a narrowing of possibilities.  What I mean here, is that even though racialization and gendering are largely accomplished through discourse and communication, we fail to pay attention to language as a medium of exclusion, or as yet another dimension of reading a person as Other.  

​Both Erica and Laye enjoy their life abroad in Amman, Jordan, and view it as an extraordinary opportunity. Their friendship has fostered a unique brand of colloquial Arabic between them. However, as it turns out, their study abroad experiences diverge in ways that relate to how their bodies are gendered and raced by others in Amman. Across each of their experiences, language remains another dimension through which they experience difference. 

For Erica, being seen as a woman narrows her opportunities to converse with men. In her homestay situation, this also leads to marriage as the central topic of conversation. This has the effect of narrowing her potential

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    Main Author

    Jamie A. Thomas is a linguistic anthropologist and digital media producer. Her forthcoming book Zombies Speak Swahili is all about the undead, videogames, and viral Black language. She is Dean of Social Sciences at Cypress College and teaches at CSU Dominguez Hills.

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